Don't Blame MSM For Gloom and Doom

If you wonder why the mainstream media isn’t shooting off the fireworks about a record close above 12,000 on the Dow, you probably think that it is all about Bush hatred.

But Dean Barnett reminds us that there is another good reason.

For most Americans who work in most industries, the economy is chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. But if you happen to work at a legacy media outpost, the good ship prosperity has left the harbor without you. Newsrooms across America are cutting staff and not giving raises. Circulation numbers (and ratings) continue to decline with no floor yet in sight. It’s understandable enough that if you work in the media, even if you happen not to be a raging-leftist-borderline-socialist, you’re probably having trouble perceiving that the rest of the country is enjoying prosperous times.

Like they say: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job.

Jeff Jacoby, he relates, thinks that the legacy media

powers that be in their clumsy efforts to fix things resemble a group of ink-stained Herbert Hoovers.

Take the example of The New York Times.

The product the New York Times gives away for free on the web is actually superior to the dead tree version you have to lay out your hard earned cash to purchase; the virtual edition is updated with headlines throughout the day and the maniacal rantings of Paul Krugman and company are kept safely behind a subscription-only firewall.

Thank goodness for that. And, of course, just yesterday The New York Times reported 39 percent lower profits.

As if on cue, a bunch of Democratic pols led by Sen Edward Kennedy (D-MA), wrote to the publisher of the New York Times Co. urging him to “resist pressures to cut staff and other resources” at the ailing Boston Globe.

Meanwhile Google announced record profits and its stock soared into the stratosphere.

The times they are a-changing.

Ralph Harris, Architect of Thatcherism

They are dying off, one by one. The great lions of the conservative renaissance, the men that provided the intellectual horsepower that drove the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, are going to their rest.

On October 19, 2006, Ralph Harris, Baron of High Cross, died. And we honor his towering achievement.

Today the bien-pensant left talks occasionally about building their own think tanks—as if the planet isn’t already groaning under the weight of left-liberal opinion—but when
Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, and chicken entrepreneur Antony Fisher opened the Institute for Economic Affairs in 1957, it was a joke.

Antony Fisher had read a condensed version of F.A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom

and was determined to do something about it.

For ten years the IEA was a shoestring operation, young and cheeky. Said Harris, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph obituary

A lot of our thinking was deliberately intended to affront [the establishment] and to wake them up.

But with Harris’s charm and fundraising abilities the IEA was able to secure funding to achieve financial stability. Then in the disastrous 1970s conservative politicians like Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher began to pay attention to the IEA and its ideas.

When Thatcher was elected British prime minister in the election of 1979 it was the intellectual output of the IEA that provided the agenda for reform.

Today, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism seem like an inevitable force of history. At the time, of course, they seemed more like Forlorn Hopes charging against the massed ranks of the left-liberal establishment.

And what these noble warriors inspired in their adversaries was hate. We all know about the foaming hatred of the Bush bashers. It was no better in Britain during the Thatcher years. The lefties hated Margaret Thatcher, hated her with every fiber of their beings. According to The Times obituary

[Harris] confirmed the extraordinary emotions she incited. “I see chaps in the House of Lords whom I know, who were contemporaries of mine at university. They won’t talk to me, and I’m not even Thatcher. I didn’t like Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, but I never felt the hatred and animus towards him that they have towards her. Itching to kill.”

It says something about our liberal friends that, faced with an honorable and spirited foe, they so easily descend into hatred and often find respectable support in their political parties and in the intellectual elite for their barbarism.

It is a tribute to men like Ralph Harris that they never allowed themselves to descend into the gutter with their opponents.

We shall not see their like again.

A Horror Story from the Affirmative Action Front

Our friends in the mainstream media love a human interest story. They love to put up a helpless victim on the nightly news and show how more government intervention and spending is needed. People have needs. Needs must be met.

Here’s a story that won’t make the nightly news, or a multi-part story in The New York Times. It’s a story about ordinary, routine corruption at a community college, a story about government bureaucrats in the diversity office blatantly violating the rules to get their buddy a job. You can read all about it here.

It tells you “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” and why so many New Deal Democrats are now Republicans.

Robert Allgeyer’s parents were children of the Depression, high school dropouts. But he went to the local state college.

In 1998 after selling his business he was teaching part-time at a community college just after Prop 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, had passed. The one and only full-time instructor in his department was retiring and so he applied for his job.

But the powers-that-be had something else in mind.

[A] faculty member in another department had caused a stir. He expressed his belief that I had been originally hired, and retained, by the "white old-boy network."

...

Let me tell you something about that outspoken faculty member: he was black. But not just any African-American! He was the son of a Ph. D. from the University of Michigan. His father was on the faculty of a Midwestern private college. Junior had gone to a prep school, then to dad's private college for his undergraduate work (in the same department where dad taught), then to dad's graduate school, UMich. Can you say "legacy"?

So Allgeyer’s application was essentially blackballed. But guess who eventually got hired?

The recommended candidate was a white male, who had gone to the same private university as two members of the committee. I'm sure he was a fine man. But with or without Proposition 209, there had been several violations of state regulations or internal rules, in the review of applications. Each of them involved an "affirmative action" rule that had been written for the advancement of women and minorities. No matter; rules are rules. The violation of those rules had the direct effect of subjecting my own application to unlawful non-review.

Robert Allgeyer recommends to the people of Michigan that they pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative this November. Whatever they may think that affirmative action and preferences does for them, the chances are that it will allow government hiring managers to hire someone from their “old-boy network,” and it will screw ordinary people without connections.

The Gathering Storm of Extremism in Europe

As Mark Steyn’s new book

America Alone
climbs up the bestseller lists, with its message of demographic collapse for our European friends we had better pay attention to the other side of the story.

It is the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.

We all tut-tutted when Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the socialist candidate to advance to the runoff in the last French presidential election. But nationalist parties are gaining strength elsewhere.

In local elections in Belgium on October 8, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, “the Vlams Belang won 20 percent of the overall national vote, reaching almost 33 percent in the city of Antwerp and even more in smaller communes.”
The Vlams Belang is a far-right Flemish nationalist party.

The reason for the explosion in the far-right vote is not hard to figure out. Voters are afraid of the rapid increase in Muslims in their countries and they are angry that the center parties have done nothing about it.

For many Europeans, the multiplying list of outrages where an intolerant, aggressive, violent, and retrograde Islam openly challenges liberal values such as freedom of speech and gender equality is a sign that a strong response is in high order. If they vote for the extremists, it is not necessarily because they have become extreme, but because the parties at the political center, which should best interpret this anxiety and give it concrete political expression, are paralyzed by political correctness, fear of antagonizing a growing Muslim electorate, or simply too naïve to understand what is at stake.

It is ironic that the Left, which believes in giving no quarter to extremism on the right, is relaxed about Muslim extremism.

When confronted with Islamic extremism, they make the claim that by talking to them and engaging them, the Muslim extremists will gain a stake in the political process and thus become more moderate — the exact opposite policy they advocate for right-wing extremism.

The Hard Left, of course, sees the Muslims as a new revolutionary class that they can lead against the Great Capitalist Satan, the United States.

Stay tuned. This problem is going to get worse before it gets better. And that assumes, pace Mark Steyn, that Europe will actually be around demographically in the years to come.

They Fined Newt Gingrich For Teaching a College Course

Yeah! Remember when they gang-tackled Newt for—get this—teaching a college course? And made him pay a $300,000 fine?

The folks at Investor’s Business Daily take us on a little political review as the feeding frenzy on Sen Harry Reid’s obscene real-estate profits fails to spread to the mainstream media.

We remember the feeding frenzy over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's alleged violation of federal tax law in using tax-exempt funds to fund his allegedly political college course, "Renewing American Civilization."

After a 3 1/2-year ordeal, and a $300,000 fine paid to the House Ethics Committee, the IRS finally ruled that the sponsoring organization, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, "did not serve the private interests of Mr. Gingrich" and was both apolitical and completely legal.

Oh good. Now of course, there is no doubt that Harry Reid’s real estate deals in Las Vegas have nothing to do with private profit, as I argue here. Oh no. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is just helping the people of Las Vegas by getting more raw land available for development and using his power and influence to get politicians and bureaucrats to surrender their little hoards up to the people. So that they can find a place to live and work and raise a family.

Still, if dear old Newt had to be sentenced first and investigated second—for the heinous crime of teaching a college course—why can’t we apply the same rules to Dingy Harry?

Even if Sen. Reid is a Democrat and therefore pure as the driven snow.

How About That Precautionary Principle Now?

Some years ago environmentalists set up the Precautionary Principle as a dodge to stop economic development. You shouldn’t do anything, they insist, unless you are pretty certain that it is safe.

Now they argue that, since everyone agrees that global warming will melt the glaciers on Greenland and inundate the low lying areas of the world that we should cut back on greenhouse gas production in coal and hydrocarbon burning. It is the precautionary thing to do.

But what about the new research that links cosmic ray intensity with cloud cover? According to Steven Milloy two Danish researchers, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, have established an experimental link between the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the earth and low-level cloud cover.

Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover -- that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth's climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.



The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the Sun's magnetic field, which shields the Earth from cosmic rays.

A hypothesis is fine, but does it check out? Thank you, Mr Vice-President, I’m glad you asked, because I know you will be anxious to update your documentary An Inconvenient Truth with the latest science.

Svensmark published a paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he claimed that his team “had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.”

Here is the press release announcing the experimental results. It shows that cosmic rays do indeed form minute aerosols of sulphuric acid as hypothesized.

But at RealClimate they are having none of it. They list five “missing steps” between establishing that cosmic rays create “ultra-small aerosol particles” and that cloud cover is controlled by the combination of cosmic rays and variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

The chaps at Junk Science are quite excited. They aren’t as vested in the “enhanced greenhouse hypothesis” as the chaps at RealClimate.

So the controversy continues.

Of course, whatever the science says the question is: what should we do about climate change? What is the precautionary thing to do?

Should we try to reverse anthropic changes like the increase in greenhouse gages over the last century? Or should we adapt to any changes in climate and sea level as they occur?

And anyway, how do anthropogenic changes play out against natural fluctuations such as earth orbit oscillations, solar radiation fluctuations, and anything else going on that we haven’t even noticed yet?

Mr President, are we safe?

Sunnis Worry About Shi'ite Power

Back in the first Bush Administration I remember a Bush administration official explaining the Iraq strategy, and I paraphrase. With the current set up we are screwed, he said, so we are going to toss everything in the air and hope that the result turns out better.

Well, at least we don’t have Saddam to worry about any more. But we do have a lot of worried Sunnis, as Terence P. Jeffrey makes clear in a report of Secretary of State Rice’s recent visit to the Middle East.

Now, it is an ironic fact that among those who ought to be praying most fervently for the success of the teetering U.S. experiment in democracy in Iraq are the non-democratic leaders of nearby Sunni Arab regimes.

...

Her agenda included the efforts to restore stability in Iraq and to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.



Sunni Arab leaders now see these causes as intimately linked -- because they see themselves sinking into a Cold War, or worse, with a Shi'ite Iran that is exploiting the unrest in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.

So the net effect of the U.S. adventure in Iraq has been to change the worry from Saddam’s aggression to Iran’s aggression.

But the Sunnis are not helpless. They could help stabilize Iraq.

If the Sunni Arab regimes want to avert the catastrophe they envision, they should use every means possible to pressure their Sunni co-religionists in Iraq to shut down their insurgency -- before it's too late -- and cut a deal with the coalition government.

Do you think it is doable?